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THE EDUCATIONAL BEARINGS OF 
MANUAL TRAINING 



lAMES PHINNEY MUNROE 



Reprinted from the Technology Rkvikw, Vol. V., No. 4 



BOSTON 

Geo. H. Ellis Co., Printers, 272 Congress Street 

1903 



THE EDUCATIONAL BEARINGS OF 
MANUAL TRAINING 



JAMES PHINNEY MUNROE 



Reprinted from the Technology Review, Vol. F., No. 4 



BOSTON 

Geo. H. Ellis Co., Printers, 272 Congress Street 

1903 



13 1^1 ^ 



p. 

^Ttthor. 



THE EDUCATIONAL BEARINGS OF 
MANUAL TRAINING* 

A friend of mine, who hated music, went once to hear 
the oratorio of "The Messiah," Describing it, he said 
that the chorus sang, " All we like sheep, all we like sheep," 
over and over, until sleep came to his relief. Then, in his 
dreams, he visited Europe, Asia and Africa, and experienced 
many adventures. Waking at last, he found the chorus 
still shouting, " All we like sheep," when, as a matter of 
fact, he declared, he hated mutton. Only after hours and 
hours, if one were to believe him, was that sentence finished 
by its necessary predicate, — " have gone astray." 

Somewhat as Handel's florid music called for the odd 
amputation of that sentence, so the exigencies of programme 
printing demanded — with my consent — the curtailing 
ot the title of my paper to-day. The programme assigns 
to me the impossible task of dealing with " The Educational 
Bearings of Manual Training." I will, if you please, 
lengthen my title but narrow my range by speaking upon 
" The Educational Bearings of Manual Training upon 
Co-ordination, Creativeness, Culture and Character." And' 
I use alliteration, not for its own sake, but because those, 
to my mind, are the four important bearings of this many- 
sided teaching process which we summarize as manual 
training. Upon those educational foundations manual 
training can stand " four-square to all the winds of heaven," 
maintaining itself triumphantly against the cold north wind 
of blind opposition, the chilling east wind of snobbish "cul- 
ture," the soft south wind of educational sentimentality, 
and the healthful west wind of intelligent conservatism. 

* An address before the Eastern Manual Training Association, July 7, 1903. 



Even the conservatives in matters of schooling are now 
agreed that co-ordination of the physical, mental and spir- 
itual powers is at the basis of all real education. From 
the wild waving of the infant's arms and the ghastly rolling 
of his untutored eyeballs up to the skill and self-poise of 
a greatest leader of mankind, the educational process is 
mainly one of co-ordination, of adjusting this marvellous 
human mechanism, of training the will to take intelligent 
command of the physical, mental and moral powers. But 
complete co-ordination cannot be brought about so long as 
that side of the physical, of the mental, and — let us not hesi- 
tate to say — of the spiritual nature reached, and reached 
only, by manual labor is left out of account. It is self- 
evident that there must be lines and areas of co-ordination 
which can be completed in no other way. It is of no 
moment that I cannot make a ship-shape box or forge a 
respectable hammer ; but it is of serious consequence to 
me that in my education the co-ordinative processes in- 
volved in the making of the box and hammer were left 
wholly out of account. Hand training would not simply 
have given me manual skill : it would have opened for me 
new channels of inter-communication ; it would have un- 
sealed for me mental and moral avenues now doubtless 
forever closed ; it would have strengthened markedly my 
poise and power of will. From the block-building of the 
kindergarten to the highest development of the fine arts 
every manual process not purely automatic, every manual 
process which requires co-operation of mind and muscle, is 
an important step forward in that general co-ordination 
which is the main end, and in which lies the chief use, of 
all human education. Therefore, simply as an aid to co- 
ordination manual training would justify itself, were that 
the sole point of its educational bearing. As a matter of 



5 

fact, however, this is its most elementary utility. It serves 
much higher uses in bringing out individuality, in awaken- 
ing desire for learning, in stimulating the will to take com- 
plete and wise command. 

It is an observation as old as time that to arouse interest 
one must promote activity, that " to do is to know." It 
was not Froebel who discovered, but it was he who most 
clearly insisted, that the way to learn is to learn by doing. 
Out of this doctrine have grown those laboratory methods 
of teaching which, starting in the kindergartens and the 
technological schools, have invaded even the most hide- 
bound colleges, and are sweeping up through the elementary 
and down through the secondary into that last stronghold 
of conservatism, the grammar schools. If, in teaching a 
child, one can make him actually do something himself, can 
lead him to create something really his own, then one has 
found a means surer than any other for arousing dormant 
and holding vagrant faculties, has opened a clear path to 
whatever capabilities the child may have, has established at 
least one point of contact between the trained individuality 
of the teacher and the, as yet, nebulous individuality of the 
growing child. But what opportunity did the old-fashioned 
curriculums offer for this important business of creative- 
ness ? They presented, as a rule, but one avenue, — and 
that the least likely for the child to follow, — the avenue 
of literary creation. Literary creation, however, is the most 
difficult of all arts, it presupposes the widest acquaintance 
with civilization and with life, it is one in which the child 
soonest meets insurmountable obstacles. Nevertheless, the 
old courses of study, feeling dimly the necessity for creat- 
iveness in education, set their pupils to the work of creat- 
ing ; and, as a result, we had in schools those worse than 
futile "compositions" on Faith, Hope or Charity, we had 



in colleges that abomination of educational desolation, the 
writing of Latin verse. In both exercises the creative 
element was about as genuine as in the conversation of a 
garrulous parrot. If teased by fond parents to admire 
those compositions or those verses, because of their inher- 
ent difficulty, one felt like making rude Sam Johnson's 
reply to the mother who asked him to admire her 
daughter's harpsichord playing because of the difficulty of 
the performance : " Difficult, madam ? Would God it 
were impossible ! " 

With manual training, however, — using the phrase so 
broadly as to include the feeblest " occupation " of the 
youngest flower in the kindergarten, — the immature faculties 
are not forced out of their normal path, the child is not 
compelled to lie to you and to himself by pretending to a 
literary power which he cannot have. One simply em- 
ploys the natural instinct of the child to use its hands, one 
merely seizes upon that passion of most children to make 
something, one but leads into regulated channels the brim- 
ming enthusiasm of healthy youth for the bending and 
shaping of inanimate things. 

One might show, of course, many directions in which 
the creative instinct stimulated by manual training serves, 
as no other educational process can, in the development of 
many a boy and girl ; but perhaps the most far-reaching 
use is in unlocking and then in forming and strengthening 
individuality. The most pressing educational question is 
how to save the child's individuality, how to keep him 
from becoming a mere cog in the monstrous social machine. 
In our pride at giving free education to milhons upon mill- 
ions of children, in our delight at the smoothness with 
which the day's programme glides by, at the precision with 
which, so to speak, the pupils present arms to us their of- 



ficers, we are falling into an easy but most dangerous uni- 
formity, we are securing a quiet in our school-rooms that is 
too often the death-quiet of spiritual collapse. Such pha- 
lanx-teaching is not education : it is pedagogical militarism. 
Real education forbids such uniformity, and demands instead 
that every boy and girl during every school-day be brought 
within the personal view and understanding, within the 
sphere of direct, humanizing influence of the human man 
or woman who is, or ought to be, the child's teacher. 
The first step towards this real education is, of course, to 
secure smaller classes in the schools, and over those smaller 
classes to place, in every instance, teachers who know how 
to teach. But a second step (and it will go far) is to infuse 
into our school programmes, from the very first to the very 
last year of school, much manual training of many kinds. 
For manual training, of whatever type, cannot be done by 
battalions : it must be performed by individuals. Hand- 
work cannot be slurred over in chorus : it must really be 
done, each piece and process, under the teacher's eye. A 
class in handicraft cannot be kept by any person with a 
voice harsh enough and an eye piercing enough to main- 
tain cowed silence among seventy children : it must be 
supervised by some one who knows how, who can stand 
the tangible test of his pupils' handiwork, and who, since 
he must personally watch every child's work, cannot in the 
very nature of things be insulted by being told to educate — 
save the mark ! — a greater number of human beings than 
is usually given of young pigs to a swineherd's custody. 

Manual training, then, makes for the intensive develop- 
ment of the individual under the vigilant eye and the really 
educating mind of the individual teacher. But education 
should be extensive as well as intensive. It should first, 
of course, develop the individual along the lines of his in- 



dividuality ; but, having done that, it ought next to broaden 
that individual along the lines of human civilization. In 
other words, having brought the child to a knowledge of 
himself, it should lead him next to know the human race. 
From the cultivation of the single boy or girl, it should widen 
out to the culture of humanity. Therefore, the third edu- 
cational bearing of manual training is upon the culture side. 
To join culture — a fetish word as blessed to the conser- 
vatives as " Mesopotamia" was to the old lady — to man- 
ual training is to scandalize the tories in education, is to 
amuse that lessening class of men who blandly assert that 
no useful study can be cultural. Nevertheless, to culture 
in its true meaning manual training has a most important 
relation. For to have culture is not merely to be learned 
in the classics and in literature : it is to have a mind fur- 
nished with many, and many different, things ; it is to have 
breadth of view, knowledge of the world, skill in dealing 
with men, ability to foresee and intelligence to grapple with 
the complex problems which meet one every day ; it is to 
possess an agreeable, an equable, a tolerant personality ; it 
implies tact ; it means, above all, power to understand and 
to deal with men. But how is one to be really broad, how 
is one to be able to meet all kinds of men, how is one to 
know life as the really cultured man ought to understand 
it, if that whole side of his experience which should look 
out towards industrialism, towards that manual labor which 
lies at the foundation of all arts and livelihood and life it- 
self, is little better than a blank wall? It is not to be main- 
tained, of course, that skill in carpentry will unravel for a 
man the labor question or enable him to deal wisely with 
the problems of the industrial world ; but he whose hands 
as well as his memory and judgment have been trained, he 
who has actually labored and has had experience, on how- 



ever small a scale, of what the industrial processes involve, 
— he is a far broader man, is a far more liberal man, is a 
far more all-around man, than one who has simply been 
delving, no matter how deeply, into literature, philosophy 
and abstract ethics. The former may possess less knowl- 
edge than the latter of the humanities, but he will know 
more of humanity ; and culture, in the modern understand- 
ing of it, is the science and art of living wisely and nobly 
with and for one's fellow-men. 

Fourthly, manual training bears strongly and with ex- 
cellent effect upon that goal of all education, — character. 
This follows naturally from its lesser function as a co- 
ordinative force. To educate is to co-ordinate; and to 
co-ordinate is to put the powers of the body and mind 
more and more under the command of an intelligent, a 
purposeful, an upward-striving will. What, indeed, is a 
formed character but one in which all the functions, all 
the thoughts, all the motives, all the desires, are mar- 
shalled, ruled and inspired by a strong and well-balanced 
will? To have taken a piece of wood and compelled it to 
the shape that lay in one's mind or upon one's paper, is 
not that an exercise in will-strengthening of the highest 
educative value ? To forge the iron, to carve the wood, 
to mould the clay, to draw the design, to conceive and to 
impress the pattern, is not each one of these a healthful, 
really educational development of will-power, accompanied 
by that sense of pleasure which comes from the act of 
construction, by that still higher delight arising from the 
contemplation of one's own finished work ? And let us 
note, in passing, the tremendous advantage of manual 
training as an educator of the will, in that its results do 
not have to be explained or accepted upon faith or looked 
forward to in some far future of postponed rewards. With 



lO 



the work of one's hands the effort, often hard and dis- 
agreeable, Is followed immediately by its result, good if 
that effort has been earnest and genuine, bad if that effort 
has not been sustained and real. Every piece of handwork 
preaches to the child, in tones which he cannot fail to 
understand, the awful law of cause and effect, the immuta- 
ble law that " whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
reap." 

These, I maintain then, are the four chief bearings of 
manual training upon education. Rightly conceived and 
carried on, it promotes co-ordination, it develops creative- 
ness, it broadens culture, it strengthens character. What 
are some things essential, however, in order that it may do 
its perfect educational work in these four directions ? In 
order to further co-ordination, manual training in some 
form — and its forms are protean — must have an integral 
place and an uninterrupted sequence in the curriculum 
from the earliest kindergarten to and through the univer- 
sity. Co-ordination is not a process to be taken up to-day 
and dropped to-morrow ; and, if manual training is to play 
a vital part in co-ordination, it must not be chopped up 
and scattered about to suit fanciful programme-mongers. 
It must be built up logically and developed wisely, to serve 
the needs of a real, organic education. 

Next, to fulfil its function as a stimulus to creativeness, 
manual training must really create something : it must pro- 
duce things of use, things of beauty. The child or the 
youth, when set to work with tools, is not satisfied merely 
to learn an abstract principle : he seeks to do something 
tangible ; and it is educationally right that this craving 
should be gratified. His teachers must make certain only 
that this tangible creation of his is really useful and is truly 
beautiful with that genuine beauty which grows out of the 
fitness of an object to its purposes. 



II 



Thirdly, to fulfil its culture function, manual training 
must be representative of the life of the child's house and 
of its neighborhood, of the atmosphere of his town or city, 
of the larger genius of his nation and his race. It must 
identify the child closely with the general industries of his 
people, with the special industries of his community. It 
must connect him, hardly less closely, with the industrial 
and social history of mankind, with that age-long history 
of which his own developing life is the inconceivably rapid 
epitome. Above all, his training on this side must be 
towards genuine craftsmanship, towards the making of true 
things solidly, of solid things beautifully. The use of what 
he makes, the beauty of what he makes, must ever be 
clearly before him ; and use and beauty must be made to 
dwell, inseparable, in his thoughts and his ideals. In this 
way will he come, better than in any other, to a real con- 
ception, to a genuine appreciation, to a true understanding 
of aesthetics, and of the close interdependence of the aes- 
thetic and the ethical. 

As to the fourth bearing of manual training, its bearing 
upon character, — I have already dwelt upon it. We can- 
not do good handwork without sticking to honesty and 
truth ; we cannot, in manual training, hide or equivocate 
or slide over. The good work we do is there, the bad 
work we do is there, plain for all the world to see. And 
every effort made in such training is a discipline of the 
will, every success is a strengthening and stimulus of 
that will, every failure — if the child be good for any- 
thing — is a trumpet-call to the renewal of that fight in 
which, if good character is to result, the will must gain the 
mastery. The splendid opportunity of the manual trainer 
is that he may by his teaching prove what Browning 
said, that 



12 



*' It is the glory and the good of art 
That Art remains the one way possible 
Of speaking truth. " 

What, then, are some of the things which manual train- 
ing must work for and must secure if it would take its 
rightful place among the great educational agencies of mod- 
ern civilization ? As was said in the beginning, even the 
conservatives acknowledge co-ordination to be at the foun- 
dation of all education ; and a very little effort ought to 
persuade them of the value of manual training as a co-or- 
dinative force. Therefore, the first thing to demand would 
seem to be continuity in manual training throughout the 
whole school life. What have we now .? Excellent man- 
ual training in the kindergarten (when it is carried on for 
the simple reason that it is good for the child to create, and 
not in deference to some far-fetched symbolism). We have 
excellent manual training in some secondary schools. In 
the years between we find some coherent, much incoherent, 
drawing ; we find here some sloyd, there some cooking, 
elsewhere some sewing, and, scattered hither and yon, vari- 
ous more or less mad experimentations of sundry cranks 
and school committees. Most of these experiments are 
tried one year and are abandoned the next, are hotly pur- 
sued by one committee and are roundly denounced by its 
successor. But in this is neither cohesion of plan nor co- 
ordination of result. Secondary school men may lay out 
good courses; but, as a rule, they are superstructures with- 
out foundations, hanging in educational air. Those 
courses ought, however, to be the culmination of eight 
years of wisely planned, steadily pursued, widely varied 
manual training exercises. The pupils coming to a high 
school should not there first meet with tools ; these chil- 
dren should have been uninterruptedly using their hands 



13 



to create, just as they have been using their tongues to 
speak, from their earliest day at school. Manual train- 
ing cannot promote co-ordination until that training itself 
is made co-ordinate. 

Furthermore, it seems to me, manual training ought to 
stop apologizing and ought, if it must, to come out and 
fight. It was perhaps necessary, away back in the seven- 
ties, for this new kind of study, like the genius imprisoned 
in Sinbad's bottle, to speak low and make fair promises ; 
for it was indeed corked up tight by that then master of 
the educational situation, the nine-centuries-old monastic 
curriculum. It was probably the part of wisdom for man- 
ual training at that time to swear that it had no thought of 
being useful, that it did not dream of connecting itself with 
vulgar trades, that it would deal with principles, not with 
practices, that it would teach the driving of nails, but not 
the making of a living. That probation period, however, 
has gone by. The bottle has been uncorked, the genius 
of manual training, or, rather, of laboratory methods, has 
come out, and has expanded to enormous proportions; 
while before it kneels the old curriculum, in its turn apolo- 
gizing for existence, in its turn begging for the right to 
live. The " humanities " may not like manual training any 
better than they did thirty years ago ; but their dislike now 
IS the hate of fear, not of supercilious arrogance. 

Being, then, practically masters of the educational field, 
why longer maintain the fiction of academic uselessness, 
why longer declare that manual training intends to be only 
disciplinary, not economically serviceable ? Its use, as I 
have tried to show, is superlatively in the direction of 
physical, mental, and moral discipline ; but its power in 
those directions will be infinitely greater if it allies itself 
with life, with industry, with bread-and-butter getting. 



14 

For, after all, every one of us must get his bread-and- 
butter, the great majority must earn it by their own two 
hands. No school education, praise Heaven, can be so bad 
as to defraud us of the lifelong schooling of our daily toil. 
But during all these centuries (thanks mainly to its mon- 
astic origin) education has been acting as though it could 
stand apart from life and livelihood, has been holding 
itself aloof from the boy's and girl's real interests, has been 
covertly sneering at manual labor, has been filling thou- 
sands and tens of thousands of honest youth with a vague 
notion that the educated man can be a sort of lily of the 
field which, having arrayed itself in Greek and Latin, need 
neither toil nor spin. Therefore, we see such a host of 
starveling clerks, pettifogging lawyers, and political hangers- 
on, therefore we find it well-nigh impossible to get a good 
mechanic, therefore we observe the tendency of craftsman- 
ship — once jealous of its skill and reputation — to seek 
short hours and shoddy ways of work. The present curse 
of this country is glue. With it we stick senseless jig-saw 
work upon our furniture, foolish gew-gaws on our " Crazy- 
Jane " houses, hideous passementerie (I think they call it) on 
our slop-shop gowns, demoralizing smatterings of false cul- 
ture upon our boys and girls. Manual training, if it will, 
can carry on a crusade of the noblest kind, — a crusade 
against this spirit of veneer, sham, hypocrisy ; a crusade 
against any ornamentation, culture, or virtue that is only 
stuck on ; a crusade for that real beauty — whether in crafts- 
manship, in art, in architecture, in literature, in social and 
political life — which grows out of the honest dedication of 
anything, no matter how homely or common, to a noble 
use; a crusade against false, monastic, anti-social, self-centred 
culture ; a crusade for real culture, which, as I have already 
said, is the science and art of living wisely and nobly with 
and for one's fellow-men. 



15 

To these ends, it seems to me, manual training must go 
into every school ; and it must go, not as a fixed plan of 
study, but as a special means of meeting the particular 
needs of that school's children. What, it should ask, is 
the prevailing industry of this city, what the peculiar craft 
of this neighborhood, what are these particular boys and 
girls almost certain to be and do? Having ascertained 
these facts, manual training can then perform an educa- 
tional work such as has scarcely yet been dreamed of in 
ennobling those industries, in uplifting those children's 
ideals, in marrying education to life, in wedding true cult- 
ure to genuine industry. 

To perform this great work, however, manual training 
has still another fight to wage, — a fight against the absurd 
distinction between the arts called useful and the arts 
called fine. There is and should be no such discrimina- 
tion. No art is fine which does not, through its beauty 
as through an enhancing veil, exhibit its fundamental use. 
No art is useful which does not, even in its simplest forms, 
mount into the empyrean of the fine. Beauty and truth 
are one and the same, and every exercise in manual train- 
ing should emphasize both. The great fields of ethics and 
aesthetics can be reached through other avenues than Greek 
and Latin ; but we have scarcely yet surveyed these avenues, 
while we have allowed the old classical paths to be over- 
grown with grammatical and philological weeds. One of the 
broadest of the modern avenues to ethics and aesthetics is 
through manual training, whose possibilities as a true culture 
study are, in my opinion, almost wholly undeveloped. For 
in most instances the manual trainers have avoided use lest 
they offend the educational tories, have failed of beauty 
because, first, there cannot be beauty without use, and, 
secondiv, because aesthetics has been terra incognita to the 



i6 

well-meaning mechanic-teacher, who, given a task to which 
he was unequal, has been as ignorant of child training as 
of true manual art. 

This brings us to the final, and what all educators know 
to be the crucial, problem of the manual training question : 
how to get teachers fit for the splendid work that they 
might do. In the beginning resort had to be, of course, 
to the ranks of the skilled mechanics, — sincere men, well- 
intentioned men, men seeking to do the best they could. 
But they were not trained teachers ; they were hampered 
by the absurd restrictions against usefulness in manual train- 
ing ; they were obliged to build for the high-school pupils 
whom they taught a superstructure without educational 
foundations. So there resulted something which was well 
called shop-work ; for it was little other than the 'prentice 
work of any shop, — interesting, somewhat stimulating, bet- 
ter than nothing. But it was not and is not manual train- 
ing in the sense in which we see its splendid possibilities ; it 
could not, in very great measure, aid in co-ordination, 
stimulate creativeness, promote culture, or build up char- 
acter. For that true work of manual training the schools 
must have broadly educated, completely trained, highly in- 
spired men and women, who see the many bearings of man- 
ual training upon life and character, who are wise in art, in 
ethics, and in that offspring of art and ethics which men call 
aesthetics. There are many such teachers now. When such 
are in the majority, manual training will surely be extended 
into all its many educative forms, will be then made con- 
tinuous throughout the whole school life, will be then up- 
lifted to its rightful place as the strongest single teaching 
force of modern times. 



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